Here’s What Happens To Your Penis In a -140 Degree Chamber

I’m standing in my underwear, covered in a robe, and wearing a pair of clogs that look like a Croc ate a Muppet and half-vomited it out. I’m staring down a six-foot tall black tube covered in evenly spaced chrome dots. It is bubbling over with misty white fog, like some sort of ale you would order at the Three Broomsticks Café in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. I’m about to step inside this device that looks like a Star Trek teleportation unit where that fog has lowered the temperature to -140 degrees Fahrenheit. As I take off my robe and let the cold envelope my body, there is only one thing I can think about: shrinkage.

Anyone possessing a penis who has swum in a lake or any human that’s watched a certain episode of Seinfeld knows that when a set of external genitals hits a cold environment it has the same reaction your mouth does when eating an entire box of Atomic Sour Balls all at once. As I embarked on my adventure with cryotherapy, a wellness trend that is gaining in popularity, I didn’t worry about how it would improve my health but rather just how sour it was going to make my balls.

The process was invented in the 1970s by Japanese doctor Toshima Yamauchi to treat arthritis patients and slowly gained popularity in Eastern Europe before skipping over to the U.S. in the past few years. Adherents to whole-body cryotherapy claim that it has all sorts of health benefits, like speeding muscle recovery, reducing inflammation, fixing joint pain, improving circulation, relieving anxiety and depression, elevating mood, boosting the immune system, and even burning 500 to 800 calories a session. Those really into it claim that repeated sessions can increase metabolic rate, boost VO2 Max, and maybe even raise testosterone levels.

The wisdom among cryotherapists is that exposure to bone-rattling cold forces all the blood to the body’s core to keep the vital organs warm, so that when the blood returns to the rest of the body it is rich in oxygen. It also provides a rush of endorphins when you realize, on a subconscious level, that you’re actually not going to die. Even on a conscious level, the feeling when opening the door of the cryotherapy sauna at the end of a session provides a sense of relief even more existential than having to hold your pee for an entire 12-hour car trip.

So far there isn’t much science to back up these claims. A 2015 study that reviewed the available research about whole-body cryotherapy found, “there is insufficient evidence to determine whether whole-body cryotherapy (WBC) reduces self-reported muscle soreness, or improves subjective recovery, after exercise compared with passive rest.” It also concluded that more study on the matter is needed.

There has been one reported death from cryotherapy in 2015, but that was a technician using an enclosed cryotherapy apparatus without supervision after hours. There have been a couple of lawsuits and reports of injury, most of those have to do with people wearing wet gloves or socks in the machine and contracting frostbite.

I made sure that absolutely everything was dry for my first round of cryotherapy at NYC Cryo on the Upper East Side. It’s tucked in a corner of Core Fitness, a personal training gym that Michael Margulies has been running for two decades. Margulies is a personal trainer with the muscular build of someone who has been lifting since he was a tight end in high school and is a big fan of cryotherapy.

While liquid nitrogen vapor cools off the apparatus, he tells me that it helped speed up his recovery from a hip replacement about a year ago. He was using the machine regularly after his surgery but now only takes the polar plunge about twice a week. He doesn’t want to smoke all of his own stash, as it were. I ask if he uses the machine regularly for his clients and others who use the gym. “The gym doesn’t sell cryotherapy,” he says. “Cryotherapy sells cryotherapy.” He rattles off the different kinds of competitive athletes and weekend warriors who have sought out his services as a professional Mr. Freeze.

Each session at NYC Cryo is $80 and includes three minutes in the sub zero tank. Margulies not only keeps customers distracted but keeps his eye on a digital screen that shows the temperature inside and counts down towart the end of a client's exposure.

Once the machine is ready, I’m provided with gloves, socks, and clogs and hop in wearing just my briefs. One stands in the cylander with his head sticking out of the top, so that the face and brain don’t feel the effects. The first 30 seconds are the hardest. As the cold envelops the whole body it gets a little hard to breathe, like a golden retriever has decided to take a nap on your chest. Margulies tells me to pace around in a circle in the small space, which seems to help at least to take your mind off what seems to be an assault on every sense. Defensively my arms start rubbing each other, like I’m waiting in line for the chairlift during a blizzard. I feel it the most in my legs, where the goosebumps become so pronounced they feel like those multi-colored candy dots that come on strips of paper. It’s so cold it hurts.

Margulies, a personal trainer to the end, keeps telling me how much time has passed and how much time I have left in the three minutes. It’s a mission of endurance, of mind over matter, much like holding a plank when the whole body starts vibrating with fatigue. We chat a bit to keep my mind off of it, and I try to process all the intense sensations that are inudating my body. Margulies starts counting down the last 30 seconds and that’s the only way I know that I can make it to the end.

The cold is so all-encompassing and centers all of the mind’s attention on survival, I didn’t have any time to even think about my junk. I head to the dressing room to put my clothes back on and see that I’ve lost a full inch from my grower-rather-than-a-shower. It’s nothing that a hot shower and a good tug can’t fix. Still the chill lingers in my limbs for a good 20 minutes and is especially stubborn in my thighs, which are still covered in goosebumbs as I walk to the subway.

After getting dressed and no longer worried about my nuts, it’s hard to focus on talking to Margulies. My body is vibrating a bit in a weird way, like I drank too much coffee or am recovering from a panic attack. It doesn’t feel bad. The slight headache and shoulder pain I had when I came in (familiar to everyone who sits at a computer all day) is gone. I feel really great, though a little bit like Han Solo as he’s coming out of the carbonite. Margulies told me that I would sleep well that night, but in the evening I’m not tired. However, when I do turn in, I sleep like the dead and wake up an hour later that I’m supposed to. Sorry, but cryotherapy ate my homework.

For my second session at NYC Cryo, it’s very much like the first one. I forgot just how awful it is to be that cold for three minutes, but unlike the first time I knew that I could make it through the entire session without actually turning into a human popsicle. The same fuzzy elation followed including another great night of sleep. Other than the somewhat grueling process of freezing your entire body at once, I didn’t really experience any adverse effects.

I don’t have any regular aches, pains, or poorly performing joints, so I don’t know what the long-term benefits of cryotherapy might be, but Eduardo Bohorquez the president of Kryolife in Midtown Manhattan absolutely swears by it. Bohorquez, who looks very fit for a man well into middle age, is a life-long athlete. His personal trainer at Equinox turned him onto cryotherapy when he had a knee replacement. She is Polish and in 2012 he had to go all the way to her native country to try it out. A venture capitalist and investor, Bohorquez basically started this whole business just so he’d have a place closer to home where he could practice it. After a pilot program at a gym in New Jersey, he opened Kryolife in 2014. He came up with a plan with his doctor where he does 25 sessions of cryotherapy 25 days in a row and then takes about six weeks off for his body to acclimitize after the stress before starting the cycle again.

His studio is on the 12th floor of a high rise near Central Park and looks like the sort of space where Real Housewives of New York would fight over champagne cocktails before freezing their Pilates toned-asses off. He says the clientele is evenly divided between men and women but the men are all coming for performance-related issues and the women are coming to look better, feel better, and lose some weight. The environment is a little bit more deluxe, but they use exactly the same machines as NYC Cryo. (They cost about $50,000 each.)

Kryolife also offers local cryotherapy, so that people can just get that pesky knee or tennis elbow iced using the same liquid nitrogen treatment without plunging their whole body in. Bohorquez treats me to a cryo facial, where the freezing cold air is pumped through a quarter-sized hole at the end of what looks like a vacuum tube. Denise, the bubbly cryotherapist, moves it around my face so that it doesn’t freeze any one section for too long. As she does this, she tells me that the treatment will tighten the skin and promote circulation and collagen production.

Just like full-body cryotherapy, at first it’s a little awful at first, especially when the polar vortex passes over my closed eyes. But after about a minute I relax into it and it feels amazing, especially along my hairline. Denise said that Sunday mornings she gets lots of unruly clients coming in getting these facials to cure their hangovers. I’m not hung over, but it does feel good. I don’t know if it did much to benefit my face in the long run, but that evening two different people told me unprompted that my skin looked amazing and like I was glowing. Localized treatments run $55 at Kryolife and full-body treatments run $75 or you can get both for $120. They even allow drop in appointments.

After the localized cryotherapy, I’m again obsessed with what it could do south of the border, especially after a bunch of stories about a spa in England that will douse the junk with freezing air for a number of different benefits. Bohorquez read the same stories tells me that is ridiculous and that it won’t really do anything but give you a severe case of the shrinks and shivers. So far, during my experience with cryotherapy, my junk has responded in what you could imagine was the normal way, a bit tight and shriveled after the initial cold snap in the tank, but then reverting back to normal with the rest of my soft tissue after an hour or so. Aside from that, there was no side effects to peeing, boners, or any of the usual activities the twig and berries are responsible for.

In fact, he says, such silly stories are hurting the whole industry. Bohorquez has reason to worry. He’s about to open Kryolife’s first storefront operation in the city’s Flatiron district, offering full-body and localized services whenever people want them and they will be on display right there on the street. All you need is three free minutes and $75.

After my walk on Arctic side, I’d definitely recommend giving it a shot, if even just for an afternoon buzz and amazing night’s sleep. I’ve done stupider things to my body that cost more and I enjoyed a whole lot less. As cryotherapy becomes even hotter as a trend the science may catch up to it, and it might even prove that cryotherapy is just as amazing as everyone says it is.

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